15. Legal Change and Legal Continuity
15. Legal Change and Legal Continuity
This chapter argues that legal change occurs by filling in gaps between the rules in the way that seems the most convenient or most just at the time; through twisting rules, or rediscovering old ones; through reformulating claims into a different conceptual category; through intervening new rules that get tacked onto existing ones; through injecting shifting ideas of fairness or justice; and through adopting wholesale procrustean theoretical frameworks into which existing law can be squeezed. Whatever changes occurred at the surface of law, and whatever accretions have been incorporated into its fabric, at a deep level the structure of the Common law of obligations remained slow-moving.
Keywords: Common law of obligations, fairness, justice, legal change
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